There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head, tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in calm defiance.
I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. "Grannie Annie! I haven't seen you in two years."
"Hi, Billy-boy," she greeted calmly. "Will you please tell this fish-face to shut up."
The desk clerk went white. "Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely againth the ruleth...."
"Okay, okay," I grinned. "Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no one there at this hour."
In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:
"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't allowed in the Spacemen's? What happened to the book you were writing?"
"Hold it, Billy-boy." Laughingly she threw up both hands. "Sure, I knew this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places."
She hadn't changed. To her publishers and her readers she might be Annabella C. Flowers, author of a long list of science fiction novels. But to me she was still Grannie Annie, as old-fashioned as last year's hat, as modern as an atomic motor. She had probably written more drivel in the name of science fiction than anyone alive.
But the public loved it. They ate up her stories, and they clamored for more. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publishers sat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount.